So tonight I joined my parents, and the neighbours, at the local pub quiz. We won, and won the bonus round, much to the annoyance of the other teams. Apparently my parents and their friends win every other week. Nerds. So to prank them the landlord had a special “Super Hard Pub Question” for us for double or nothing on our prize (vouchers for a gallon of beer) to let the rest of the pub feel better because we were “guaranteed to lose” since there was “no way we could know the answer.” I got picked to answer it because I’m the youngest and have less General Knowledge.
The question?
“What is the word for beer in Ancient Egyptian?”
Pub: *loud raucous laughter and cheering*
Landlord: *looks smug*
Me: Do you want that in English or in the original Hieroglyphs?
Landlord: The hieroglyphs of course!
Pub: *more laughter*
Me: *scribbles quickly in the 10 seconds I had to answer*
Landlord: Fuck. Me.
Pub: *utter silence broken only by someone at the back exclaiming WTF*
Landlord: How did you even know that?
Me: You picked the one person here who can read them?
Landlord: Oh shit it’s you isn’t it?
Dad yelling from the back: SURPRISEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
It’s safe to say we’re simultaneously fucking legends/not very popular at the local right now.
openin’ the door to the microwave one second early because you don’t need all the hootin’ and hollerin’
I’D LOVE TO ELABORATE because this is one of my favorite astronomy stories.
Okay. So in the field of Radio Astronomy, there’s this phenomenon called a “fast radio burst”, a very short, strong radio pulse picked up by a radio telescope. They’re still poorly understood, and are considered very exciting to radio astronomers because of how rare they are.
In the 2010’s, astronomers working at Australia’s Parkes Radio Observatory identified a number of radio signals picked up by the telescope that appeared to resemble fast radio bursts, which they called Perytons.
However, they quickly realized that the signals had to be terrestrial in origin due to the strength of the signal…. as well as the fact that they always occurred during weekdays, around the same time.
The signals tended to be clustered around midday… hmm…
Further evidence that the signals were man-made… this trend also followed daylight savings!!!
(Unless aliens also follow Australian daylight savings conventions, which is highly unlikely…)
They were unable to recreate the signal, until they tried opening the microwave door before it beeped. Turns out the microwave was letting out a tiny amount of radio emissions when the door opened, which the nearby telescope was sensitive enough to detect.
The Peryton signals had been popping up in the data for over a decade, presumably because astronomers taking their lunch breaks had been opening the break room microwave prematurely for the same reason cited by OP.
I imagine they must have a big sign reading “LET THE MICROWAVE FINISH BEFORE OPENING” hanging in the break room now.
TLDR: If you work in radio astronomy, let the microwave beep before opening it and removing your lunch.
There is something really, uh, telling, about how Jimmy Carter’s presidency was widely considered to be a “failure,” and he also is INARGUABLY the U.S. president who has done the most to promote human rights around the world.
It’s extremely telling, about the U.S. nation-state as a political project and institution, about the federal government as a structure, about the nature of imperialism.
To reference a friend of mine, he was the only U.S. President alive in our lifetime who could avoid the International Criminal Court.
RIP Jimmy Carter, Oct 1, 1924 – Dec 29, 2024
He pardoned all Vietnam War draft dodgers on his second day in office
He created a national energy policy that included conservation, price control, and new technology
He was a true good one, the likes of which we will never have again (and it makes it even worse that he was replaced by Ronald Reagan, source of so much that is wrong in modern America). Rest in peace, sir.
amhrancas 